


in the form of stars

by salvage



Series: names of endurance, names of devotion [1]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: M/M, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:40:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24478846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salvage/pseuds/salvage
Summary: Commander De Haven of theUSS Advancehad berthed the commanders ofErebusandTerrorbeside one another in the cramped officers’ quarters ofAdvanceand in the few days they had been on board Francis had, somewhat shamefully, gotten into the habit of listening for James on the other side of the wall that separated them. It was not, he reasoned, unlike the way he used to sit at James’s bedside, listening for James’s reedy breaths in the shuffling-shale quiet of Terror camp or above the muffled movements of Hudson’s Bay men at Fort Resolution. As James’s body knit itself back together his breaths came steadier but Francis had sat with him through it, still, until Jopson in his canny way had asked one of the Hudson’s Bay men to move a cot into Fitzjames’s room for Francis.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Series: names of endurance, names of devotion [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1779907
Comments: 32
Kudos: 108





	in the form of stars

**Author's Note:**

> > The waters of the dead, a clear road,  
> every lover in the form of stars, the road  
> blocked.  
> 
> 
> Richard Siken, [Saying Your Names](http://youngerpoets.yupnet.org/2008/04/17/saying-your-names-crush-by-richard-siken-2004-winner)

In another world he knew the feeling of James Fitzjames’s throat beneath the callused and frost-numbed pads of his fingers, the skin there dry and prickly with stubble, the muscles of his esophagus fluttering weakly as Francis massaged them. In that world Francis remembered the way a stray drop of the cloudy-clear liquid had made its way out of James’s mouth, coursing over his prematurely lined cheek, the dumb animal of his body struggling to reject the laudanum that Francis had fed him as gently as he could manage to with his hands shaking so; he remembered, too, the second drop, James struggling to survive, his weak throat closing, refusing to swallow as though it knew what the liquid would do to him, the way Francis had blotted at his cracked lips with his own handkerchief, wishing, inanely, that the stained and worn fabric were clean: like asking “Are you comfortable, James?” when James was too weak to walk, more bruised than not, bleeding bright red into the sclera of his eye, his gums and his scalp and his long-healed long-storied wounds all dissolving and nothing, nothing, nothing Francis could do about it. There were other things, too, the Francis of that world knew: the silence of the ice under which plump seals swam; the sweet-sour scent of decay of Thomas Blanky’s leg stump; the tough, gummy texture of Harry Goodsir’s skin between his loose, aching teeth. He dreamed of these things, and of more horrors besides, the carrion-stink of a sharp-toothed maw; the shock, like plunging one’s hand into the luminous coals of Mr. Diggle’s stove, of those jaws closing around his wrist. 

Francis’s eyes snapped open and for a moment he thought this, too, was one of the hideous dreams that dogged him during the few hours he managed to sleep each night, the close sweat-and-salt scent of a lower deck, the gentle roll of the sea, torments just as cruel as the sight of Thomas Jopson’s wide unseeing eyes, his clouded irises the same color as the dull shale that surrounded them interminably in all directions. 

_Jesus_. The cabin he was in was warm, insufferably so; the ship around him riotously loud with the familiar scuffle and bustle of shipboard life: the murmur of voices, the hollow thud of boots on deck, the creak of taut lines and the low hum and flutter of the wind in the mainsail. As he laid there he listened to the soft whine and shudder of the wooden boards that made up the aft of the ship, its sloping sides and sturdy decks, shifting against one another not with the inexorable ever-inward press of ice but with the soft lapping of the salt sea. 

She was still there, as far as he knew, the ice slowly throttling her ten-inch-thick reinforced hull, three inches of finest English oak and three inches of African oak, diagonal-laid for strength, and four more of Canadian Elm, each, in its turn, splitting and cracking and shattering in his imagination. The party of Hudson’s Bay Company men who trekked to the icebound ships sent word only of casualties and survivors, not of the state of what Francis knew to be his last command. He remembered lying in his bunk on _Terror_ hearing the screams and groans of what must have been the ice twisting and pressing against the twenty-one huge iron water tanks that lined the hull; the intermittent pop and snap of timbers shifting. The ice would break her and the sea would take her, in time, as these inexorable forces of the North did to all things. 

Almost all, Francis amended, sitting up in his berth and running a hand over his face. Almost. In the distance two muffled bells sounded: 5:00 a.m. lubberly time. At this latitude the sun would not yet be risen but its incipient glow would color the sky a rich indigo; when it did breach the line of the horizon its oranges and yellows would reflect upon the mirror of the water, distant whitecaps picking up the colors like little flames that burned the gauzy clouds from the sky until the morning dawned clear and crisp. 

Commander De Haven of the _USS Advance_ had berthed the commanders of _Erebus_ and _Terror_ beside one another in the cramped officers’ quarters of _Advance_ and in the few days they had been on board Francis had, somewhat shamefully, gotten into the habit of listening for James on the other side of the wall that separated them. It was not, he reasoned, unlike the way he used to sit at James’s bedside, listening for James’s reedy breaths in the shuffling-shale quiet of Terror camp or above the muffled movements of Hudson’s Bay men at Fort Resolution. As James’s body knit itself back together his breaths came steadier but Francis had sat with him through it, still, until Jopson in his canny way had asked one of the Hudson’s Bay men to move a cot into Fitzjames’s room for Francis. It was comforting to listen to James’s breathing, the soft sounds the sheets (sheets!) made against his skin when he shifted his increasingly mobile limbs, his intermittent little sleep-noises which Francis always quieted him through, gently clasping James’s hand in both of his own and rubbing his thumb over the point of James’s pulse in his wrist beside the stark lines of his tendons: alive, alive, alive. 

When Francis could stand it no longer he shoved his feet into his boots; easier, now, as his feet were no longer swollen with days of incessant walking on the dusty, slippery shale that shifted beneath each step. (It was easier, too, now that he had lost a few toes to frostbite, the two smallest on his left foot and the second and half of the third on his right. This little loss, like their rescue, was a minor miracle to the atheist and sometime Papist Francis Crozier, who had seen men lose entire feet, or all their fingers, or all but one protruding lewdly and uselessly from the razed landscape of their flat empty palms, to the cold.) He had, in deference to the stuffy little cabin in which he was ensconced, given up the habit of sleeping in his greatcoat, but he kept all of his other clothes on so it was a matter of moments to don the greatcoat, too, and exit the cabin. The corridor of officers’ country on _Advance_ was less cramped than that of _Terror_ ; only just, but compounded upon the few stone he had lost starving in the barren Arctic landscape it might as well have been the wide marble hall of the Admiralty House in London. Still: he barely needed to leave his own room to be in front of James’s. He knocked lightly on the door with his first knuckle, just once, before thinking the better of it and simply sliding the door open. 

James’s clear hazel eyes fluttered open, fixing immediately on where Francis’s figure blocked the faint light that seeped in from the hall. “Francis,” he rasped. 

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” Francis said, but he didn’t step out of the room.

“It seems as though all I’ve done for the past month is sleep,” James said, pushing himself upright. His hair, thinned from illness but still long as he had always kept it, was flattened and snarled charmingly against the side of his face. His blanket pooled around his waist, revealing his battered and threadbare sweater and all the layers he wore under it, sleeping, like Francis, in all but his greatcoat. “Well, come in,” James said, gesturing to the empty space beside him on the bunk. 

Francis closed the door to the little cabin behind himself as he went in, needing only to about-face to be sitting beside James. The weeks of recovery, months of illness, and years of close quarters below decks on their respective ships had eroded any sense of distance between them and Francis barely registered the closeness of James’s body to his own as they sat side by side on the bed, sheets still rucked around James’s waist as he carefully swung his legs out of bed. His joints didn’t pain him as they had but he would never regain the ease of movement he’d had before scurvy had ravaged his body; Francis felt a kind of sympathetic ache when he watched James carefully handle his own body, as though each movement, each bend of his elbow and each turn of his neck, sent great seisms of pain through him. “Like ground glass in the joints” was how Harry had described it to Francis, sotto voce, beside the fluttering entrance of the command tent inside of which James slept, restlessly, tension etched across his face. 

“Stop looking at me like that,” James teased gently. 

“I will not.” Francis had little control over how he looked at James and had already resolved that, having been starved for so long in so many ways, he would not deprive himself of the sight of James’s pink skin and clear eyes, nor of his self-conscious closed-mouth smile nor the little curls at the ends of the hair that framed his strong jaw. No: Francis would look his fill; Francis would feast upon the sight of James, alive, whenever he wanted to. 

And oh, how Francis wanted to. 

Francis remembered—vaguely, the way he remembered much of the time before the expedition, and through a whiskey-colored veil—the disdain he had felt toward the foppish commander assigned to _Erebus_ under Sir John. He had no patience for Fitzjames’s self-aggrandizing stories, buffed to a highly unnatural sheen by what Francis had assumed was a young and privileged man’s ego; he had less patience, still, for anyone who did anything but repudiate the title of “handsomest man in the Royal Navy,” even awarded in jest. But James had proven to be a competent Second to Francis after Sir John died and things really went to shit, capable of admitting his own mistakes with a grace Francis found vanishingly rare among commissioned officers of the Royal Navy. What Francis had taken for self-aggrandizement was simply a self-awareness that seemed to be as much a curse as it was a blessing to James. And then, having so recently developed an esteem for James, to watch him—to watch them all—well. Francis would gaze upon him now with whatever look he wanted. He had earned it; they both had.

They took a turn about the deck of _Advance_ together, James’s arm tucked in Francis’s, seamen and petty officers knuckling their foreheads and dipping their eyes in respect as they passed. The sea stretched in all directions around them as the shale had on King William Island, seemingly endless, but unlike the shale it glittered as it undulated in the pre-dawn light, ever shifting and changing, smelling cleanly of salt. The wind was strong but not cold; still, when James shivered minutely against Francis’s side Francis abruptly directed them back to the lower deck. 

“You needn’t mother-hen me,” James griped, but he accepted Francis’s help down the main ladder and cleaved to his side whenever the narrow corridors of the ship allowed, the line of his slim forearm pressed into Francis’s side. 

They went back to James’s room but James did not relinquish Francis’s arm so Francis followed him in. James sat on the bunk and Francis tugged the little stool out from under the desk, arranging himself kitty-corner to James, shuffling around in an attempt to get comfortable until James said, “Just sit here,” patting the bed beside him, and Francis did. They sat side by side quietly as the ship roused itself around them, whistles and muffled cries, the tolling of four bells, footsteps on the quarterdeck and in the officers’ corridor and throughout the lower deck of the ship, from the captain’s cabin to the galley. 

“It’s so alive,” James said quietly, as though his thoughts exactly followed Francis’s. 

The North had not been silent: the wind whipped and whistled through the jagged forest-maze of ice that separated _Erebus_ and _Terror_ and through their shortened rigging, the ice shrieked and moaned where it crushed the hulls of both ships, and the sledges and their feet had noisily shuffled through the loose rocks of King William Island. Yet those were no more the sounds of life than the thing that had hunted them was a bear. In contrast _Advance_ was a symphony, the gentle creak of her solid wood planks and the high clear chime of her bell, the flap and flutter of her sails, the hollow underwater slosh echoing through the empty spaces of the orlop, more mellifluous than any opera Francis had ever been forced to sit through. 

“Do you remember the hand organ?” Francis asked.

“The only casualty of Carnivale I did not mourn,” James deadpanned. 

Francis snorted. “Hodgson loved it. God, there was this tune he used to play on it that would drive Ned Little absolutely mad.” 

James’s eyes went distant, his brow furrowing in concentration. He hummed a few notes of the tune, a song that had been popular in London dance halls perhaps seven years previously; it was not a good song then, and time and repeated exposure had not increased Francis’s love for it. James’s voice was soft and pleasant, though, the reverberation so deep in his chest Francis thought he could almost feel it where their bodies touched, shoulder and arm and thigh. 

“Wretched,” James said with a sly sideways glance at Francis. 

“Nonsense, I thought you sang it rather well,” Francis replied, deliberately misunderstanding him. “Perhaps you should look into the dance hall circuit when we return to London.” 

“Absolutely wretched,” James repeated. Then he went still and quiet beside Francis. 

Francis waited him out. The ship buzzed with activity around them.

“I find myself unaccountably anxious about returning,” James said. “Not to the Admiralty, not the court martial—”

“Knighting,” Francis corrected. 

James gave him a look. 

Francis raised his eyebrows. 

“Nor any of that,” James continued doggedly. “But about London itself. The crowds, the din, the terrific press of humanity from all directions—can you remember? Can you even imagine it?” 

“I prefer not to. If I did, I’d never return at all.” 

James breathed out a soft laugh. “I think I should join you in that.” 

Francis had both the misanthrope’s and the Irishman’s disdain toward London; hating London was practically a recreational activity for Francis. But James had thrived there. Francis remembered, through the usual amber haze that tinted all similar memories, standing obstinately near the wall at some Admiralty banquet and watching James flit about the room, drink balanced in one gloved hand, hair curled just so, boots gleaming in the candlelight, perfectly tailored full dress uniform emphasizing the sharp dip of his waist and the long lines of his thighs. A useless popinjay, Francis had thought disdainfully, knocking back the rest of his drink and signaling a waiter for another. But in retrospect Francis saw the scene in a different light: the ambitious young Commander, horribly, perpetually aware of the secret of his parentage, desperate to prove himself not only to the lords and flag officers whose presence dominated every Admiralty event but also to himself. (Retrospect also offered up a less-than-flattering portrait of Francis, flushed with whiskey and the heat of the room, alternately surly and downright rude to any unwise enough to approach him. Francis tucked this image away with all its like; nothing to be done about it, now.) 

“You would deprive so many dinner parties of your tale of surviving the Chinqiang bullet a second time?” Francis asked, but lightly, leaving space for James to disagree. 

“Dinner parties,” James repeated faintly. “Should we distill the horrors we’ve seen, the losses we’ve suffered, to a pleasant-tasting quaff designed to stimulate the appetites of men who have never wanted a day in their lives?” 

“James.” 

“Should we elide the gruesomest details to make it palatable to ladies?” 

“James,” Francis said again. 

James breathed out heavily and pressed a hand to his mouth as though to physically stem the tide of words. “Apologies,” he said, muffled against his own palm. 

“Don’t apologize to me,” Francis said shortly, feeling helpless, and he clasped a hand to James’s near shoulder. James immediately leaned into him and he slid his arm around James’s back, pulling him close. 

Their bodies slotted together just so: James was tall, and too slim, and Francis felt stocky and clumsy beside him, but his arm fit easily around James’s hunched shoulders and James’s head fit under Francis’s chin. James exhaled deeply and when Francis felt the mass of James’s body heave against his own he was acutely aware of the fragile mortality of this man, thin skin and brittle bone, the vulnerable softness of all the complex inner workings of his body. He held James tighter and James slumped bonelessly against him, trusting Francis to keep him upright, and Francis did. He felt, at once, impossibly tender and fiercely protective. 

“I never once attended a dinner party I didn’t loathe,” Francis said conversationally. 

James shuddered; with his face hidden against Francis’s chest, it could have been a laugh. Francis sought James’s hand blindly with his own, caught it, and held it tightly, twining their fingers together. Like the rest of him, James’s hand was slim, the knuckles too prominent, but he squeezed Francis’s back with a surprising strength. As they held one another, the ship humming with life around them, tension eased from James’s body. Francis mentally braced himself for the situation to become awkward but the awkwardness didn’t come. Instead they settled against one another more comfortably, Francis resting his chin upon the top of James’s head, feeling a little spot of humidity collect between his shirtfront and sternum from the warm huff of James’s breath. 

“In any case,” Francis eventually said, softly, his breath stirring the thin hair at the crown of James’s head, “you’re handsome enough to be eccentric instead of curmudgeonly.” 

James did laugh at that. “Not any longer, I’m afraid.” 

Francis shook him gently in his arms. “Nonsense. I’ll accompany you to every society event so that the contrast between us emphasizes your many charms.” 

At this James drew back enough for Francis to see the splotchy flush that colored his face and the little furrow of his brows. “I wish you wouldn’t speak of yourself like that.” James’s face was prematurely lined, still sunken in the wake of his long illness, but his hazel eyes were bright and clear. His previously sallow, wind-chapped skin was pinking and healing so that the strong set of his jaw and the straight line of his nose were again his most prominent features. More than that: this was the face of a man who had encountered extraordinary trials, had faced them head-on, and had survived. And every sly glance and amused slant of his mouth spoke of not just his survival but his resilience. With the hand that wasn’t tangled with James’s own Francis cupped James’s cheek, sliding his thumb over the arch of his cheekbone. 

“Then permit me to call you handsome,” Francis said. 

James pressed up toward him gently, almost tentatively, eyes sliding closed so that his eyelashes fanned out against his pale cheeks. His mouth just brushed against Francis’s for a moment but everything in Francis went still and silent so that he could inhabit that moment fully, the past and the future abandoned like the crates of tools and books and porcelain dishware and cut-glass vessels they had left strewn across the ice, a jagged line leading from hell to salvation. 

When James tried to draw back Francis slid his hand around the nape of his neck to hold him there for a second kiss, fuller than the first and warm with mutual intent. As familiar as was the comforting press of James’s body against his own, so thrilling was this new intimacy. As familiar as was the habit of listening for James’s breaths, so thrilling was the soft gasp James loosed against Francis’s mouth. As familiar as was the assurance of James’s survival, so thrilling was the miracle of his wanting Francis as ardently as Francis wanted him: the tangle of their hands, the soft noise caught in James’s throat, the press of James’s thigh against his own. 

The ship was alive around them; James was alive against him; they had survived, together, four years of relentless winter, and inside of Francis, spring blossomed.


End file.
